While it’s probably too early to brand the Semantic Web as “Web 3.0”, it was heartening to read about how things are starting to take shape. Now I know that Reuters may have a killer app called Calais that converts meaningless data into something more semantic. Other companies are following suit.

These semantic tools may just bring ‘sexy’ back to the web.

Date: Thursday, 6th March 2008
Time: 7:30pm
Place: New York, New York, Citylink Mall (City Hall MRT Station)

Of course, the PDF by Patrick H. Lauke on Too Much Accessibility is a must read for anyone who is interested in not abusing accessibility.

Cross posted at nimbupani.com

As with the Web Standards Project, there is an Acid Test… for email clients which confirms my suspicions that Lotus Notes, even in its latest form, still sucks. I’m not even using the latest version. Or the second latest. I’ll share my little story with you.

Incidentally, anyone wants to join me for ETech (3-6 March) right before this?

• lack of alt-text on graphics
• inaccessible image maps
• the lack of adequate prompting and labeling
• the denial of keyboard access
• the requirement that transactions be performed solely with a mouse
• lack of navigational links

In Singapore, accessibility services seems to be provided majorly by Designafa - especially for government websites. Lets see how well these are managed by their own website:

They have made it so simple, you got to be crazy to use streetdirectory.com.

Previously, you had to:

1. Get your own Googlemaps API
2. Find the geographical coordinates by ripping it off the browser’s location bar
3. Substituting the coordinates and zoom level into some obfuscated code
4. Pasting the code onto your site

Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman Francis’s book Web Development Solutions has a short section on how to embed Google Maps via microformats, but it’s still not as easy as it should be.

What: Journalism 2.0
When: Monday, 20th August 2007 @ 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Where: NUS Lecture Theatre 11, Kent Ridge Campus, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Hat tip: Midnight Monkey and Siva.

I don’t know why they don’t have a website.

Don’t even get me started on our efforts for a standard operating environment.

Adopt open standards and avoid chaining yourself to proprietary solutions.

Thanks to Coleman for taking the initiative.

This isn’t a giant update nor a new book entirely. Rather, it brings the examples in line with Internet Explorer 7 (which wasn’t released when the first ed. was published) and adds several more examples based on ems (which were sorely lacking from the original book). There are of course errata fixes and nips and tucks throughout as well, and about 30 additional pages were added in total. All in all, I’m happy to have the book be all the more solid and relevant.

I’d like to see what he says about ems because I use that for font sizes, mostly to enable users of previous versions of Internet Explorer to resize text if they needed to. However, on some occasions I’ve received comments at work that the font size on my websites is too ridiculously large. Usually that’s because their font size settings have been set to ‘large’ or ‘larger’ and they’ve forgotten about it.